Of Welsh and Brits

I have just had two interviews with the British financial company. It was pleasant to talk to real Brits despite their tendency to seat so far from the phone that occasionally I could not recognize their questions. It is kind of stupid to look stupid only because of the low volume.

Both interviews were rather cursory. While the HR guy's mission clearly was to check my fluency and motivation to go abroad (well, he even was 15 minutes late calling me so I must have been just a nuisance preventing them from calling it a day), the shallowness of the technical conversation surprised me. As a matter of fact, I am not sure what the discussion was supposed to achieve - a technical interview of less than an hour is barely heard of. In a sense, I am almost disappointed with the way it happened.

The asked technical questions were .. well, stale and petty. As an example - "What's the difference between final, finally and finalize()". Are they looking for entry-level folks or what? Frankly, I expected a hard-core discussion of concurrent programming or garbage collector tuning so I felt myself pretty dumbed down.

The system itself is a trading platform written in plain old java. They seem to have a relaxed environment, independent QA and little adherence to a particular methodology.

We had a party yesterday where the company which bought was celebrating its birthday. "Wine and dine" was generous and provided me with the opportunity to talk to a Welsh colleague. Like most of the foreigners I have met he is a curious fellow with a local girlfriend. He amused me by talking about the history of this country and its culture. Apart from it, he told me that the profit margin of working in the UK is higher than in the US. As he has worked in many countries, he might have a point so probably it makes sense to listen to him.